2. The 15-hour Workweek may eventually be Possible

In 1930, Keynes delivered a remarkable, and well known, speech, in Madrid, entitled ‘the economic prospects of our grandchildren’.Reference Keynes ⁷ He predicted that in a hundred years’ time the workweek in the ‘advanced countries’ (these days we would say ‘developed’) would consist of 15 hours, and, also, that people would spend the gained leisure time in high-culture activities (he definitely did not envision soccer). Yet, even if, indeed, the workweek has shortened considerably, it has not done so to the extent predicted by Keynes. I will be charitable and not comment on the use of free time.

It is possible that Keynes simply did not get the timing right. But allow me here to take a more normative perspective. Suppose that the authorities of an advanced country did decide that the objective of reaching a workweek of 15 hours was a fundamental social objective. Conceivably, they could then legislate it and, assuming enough enforcement capacity, it could even be implemented in practice. Needless to say, if this was done now and instantly, it would constitute a tremendous negative shock to the well-being of that country. So, let us assume that there is some common sense in these authorities and that the 15-hours limit is viewed as an objective that has to be reached in a manner compatible with continuous growth in GDP per capita. Can this be accomplished? I believe so. Undoubtedly the rate of growth of the economy would not be as high as it could be, and the investment in mechanization would have to be quicker and deeper that it would if the 15-hour week was not the overwhelming purpose of the authorities. Basically, investment and growth would need to be oriented towards substituting labor and, certainly, some control would need to be exercised over the development of projects that could be labor intensive.

In the rest of this presentation I will argue, however, that while, as just said, a planner could minimize the use of labor, this is not what will naturally happen in the economy (in particular, this is not what the populations of the future, through the political process, will demand their leaders to accomplish), and, second, that as an objective of policy it is rather silly and that in fact an economy without work is not desirable. If policy has a role to play in this matter it is more likely that it is in the direction of facilitating the possibility of work.

3. Job Generation in Tomorrow’s Economy

I will now contemplate a future in which economic institutions are simply an extrapolation of what we currently have: market driven but with an important role for regulatory policies, including taxation, and for macro-management through fiscal and monetary instruments.

I’ll call ‘work’ the exertion of personal effort for the purpose of generating something (a product, a service,…) exchangeable for money with another subject, maybe a firm, or the public administration, or another person. This is a definition, I have to admit, open to well-known paradoxes (thus, when someone marries his/her housekeeper some work vanishes).

The question I now pose to myself is: keeping the population constant, what is more likely, an increase or a decrease of work in the future of our economies? Or, in a similar vein, what is the most likely sign for the balance of destruction and creation of jobs? Do not expect a clear-cut answer from what follows. ⁸ I imagine that, at the end of the day, it can go either way. What I will argue is that it would be rash to jump to the conclusion that the odds are on the side of destruction. I rather bet on the contrary.

Jobs may be created if a market, an economic sector, emerges or expands. There are many reasons why this may happen, but an important one is the advance of knowledge. Think of all the jobs generated by the internet, or those that the future may have in store because of the new drone, or 3D, technologies. Jobs may be destroyed for the symmetric reason, the contraction of the market, but also because of mechanization of existing jobs. Let me concentrate on this aspect. Consider a producing firm. In principle, a robot replaces a human if the firm finds it profitable to do so, or – to put the firm in a more sympathetic light – if competition pushes the firm to do so. The replacement will be more likely if: (i) the wage is high, or (ii) the robot is cheap. If we consider only the first factor then the introduction of the robot has an element of good news: it means that the going price for labor, the wages, is high. Certainly, whatever force is driving up the level of wages will be attenuated by the substitution, but the fact remains that the replacement would not take place if the level of wages was low. The generalization of robots occurs first in high-wage countries.

The second factor, the cost of robots, is the decisive one. For robots that can execute a certain task, the cost, at the inception of its use, may be high but it is safe to presume that it will decrease over time. In part, this will be so because the price of new products is set to recover the R&D expenses or, if you have read your Schumpeter, because it is set to exploit the temporal monopoly power that a new product provides (maybe it is protected by a patent, maybe it takes time for competitors to catch-up).

In addition, success has implications for costs. If a new product finds a receptive market, then the forces of increasing returns gather in all their strength. Volume and the passing of time are the midwives of improvements of every sort. Makers of robots will invest more and more in perfecting their product and in bringing to the market new generations of them. Those, again, will be costly at the time of launching but, at the same time, we will simultaneously see a reduction of the price of the older cohorts. In the aggregate, perhaps the cost of robots of a certain category will remain constant but, undoubtedly, their productivity will increase steadily, and so will, therefore, the incentives for adoption. Think of those robots we call computers. In summary: robots are powerful devices of job destruction. So much should be obvious enough.

Recall, however, that there is the countervailing force of the jobs created by the advance of knowledge (in rigor, as it will become clear, I should also add by prosperity). To go a bit deeper into this let me note that at a given level of knowledge we could classify tasks into four categories:

1. (i) Impossible tasks: those that currently neither humans nor robots can do (say, prime factoring a very large number in one hour);

2. (ii) Robotic tasks: those that robots can do, but not humans (say, computing at the speed of today’s computers);

3. (iii) Mechanizable tasks: those that both humans and robots can do. It follows that if the price of its realization by a human (the wage) is higher than the cost of the corresponding robot, there will be no demand for its realization by a human, no matter how prosperous society becomes. It is easy to come out with examples of these tasks;

4. (iv) Human tasks: those that only humans can do.

The separation among these categories is, of course, fluid, especially because, as I indicated, it depends on the current level of knowledge. Thus, as this level expands, part of the human tasks will become mechanizable, and part of the first category will shift to the remaining three: at a steady pace impossible tasks become possible. This does not mean, incidentally, that the impossible category will empty out. It requires knowledge to know what cannot be done. The horizon of tasks we know that neither humans nor machines can execute is like a cloud that surrounds the sphere of what is known: the cloud is always there, no matter how large the sphere becomes.

In this classificatory framework, any argument that takes an optimistic view of the future availability of jobs for humans has to rest on the combined pull of the human and the mechanizable categories, acting, of course, through the market forces that may determine that some mechanizable tasks are not in fact mechanized. That is, it needs to reason that there will be no lack of tasks for which, at the level of technical knowledge of the moment considered, it will be worthwhile to enlist a human, rather than a robot, to discharge it.

Let me, therefore, discuss in more detail the prospects concerning the evolution of the three items: human tasks, mechanizable tasks, and market forces.

Here are some examples of tasks that are currently in the human task category.

• ∙ The direction team, broadly understood, of a business firm may be helped by robots. But these will not replace the necessity of a substantial human contingent. In fact, there is no reason why, in relation to the size of the economy, the number of people involved in these activities should decrease as the economy grows. Rather the contrary. The larger the team of one firm, the larger the competing team needs to be. Presumably, the effect will not be explosive, but it will certainly be expansive (in economics parlance, we say that the size of the teams are strategic complements).

• ∙ We could say exactly the same for the leadership team of a political party, or any sort of institution.

• ∙ We need engineers, in large numbers, to tend to an increasing number of robots. Somebody must design the next robot. True, the time where robots can self-improve may have already arrived. But this is very far from the capacity to innovate radically.

• ∙ Good plumbers.

• ∙ Novels – well, maybe good novels – are not written by robots. The same for sophisticated journalism, say good foreign reporting.

• ∙ I would like to think that a robot could not accumulate the merits necessary to be a member of the Academia Europaea.

• ∙ Robots researchers, priests, pastors or rabbis?

Human tasks today may, of course, become mechanizable tomorrow, and mechanized the day after tomorrow. But even if every current task was mechanizable, we would not be forced to conclude that as salaries increase without limit the use of labor would tend to vanish. As I already noted, the advance of knowledge generates new markets. I add now that at those associated with the expanding frontier of knowledge new human tasks will emerge with force. At the rearguard of the frontier the human tasks may become mechanizable and perhaps, given the dynamics of robot improvement, humans will be substitutable by machines to a degree higher that what we have been historically used to. Yet knowledge grows in all directions and in every direction there is a frontier for humans to potentially colonize. There will be, I’m convinced, a consistently high need for human labor at these frontier areas. Adam Smith spoke of the division of labor, his engine of productivity growth, being limited only by the extent of the market. I would add that in the long run the extent of the market is limited only by the extent of knowledge and that the permanent presence of a knowledge expansion effect guarantees, by itself, that the division of labor includes a substantial sector of human tasks.

But this is not all. I have just argued that even if every conceivable human task becomes, with time, mechanizable, and even more, it becomes mechanized, the dynamic effect of the expansion of knowledge will guarantee the persistence at every moment of human tasks. However, I would strongly disagree with a claim that every conceivable human task is of this type. Let me at this point define a sub-category of human tasks:

1. (v) Essentially human tasks: those where the humanity of the deliverer is in the nature of what constitutes the particular service delivered by the task. Those are tasks, therefore, that will remain human at any level of knowledge.

This subcategory of essentially human tasks is far from empty. I illustrate this with two classes of examples:

1. (a) In the summer of 2016 I had the pleasure to attend a modern dance spectacle. It was superb. I’m glad to give it some publicity: it was the Alonzo King company, based in San Francisco. There were eight dancers, very athletic all of them, and they did marvelous things. Afterwards I kept thinking, however, that, possibly, it would have been even more striking with double the number of dancers, and also, this time without the possibly and more to the point, that I could see no prospect that they could be replaced by robots. No doubt, a good show of dancing robots could be very interesting, just imagine what they, freed from biological shackles, could do. But it would not be the same spectacle (it would be an artistic performance closer in spirit to kinetic art). Certainly, from a purely logical point of view one cannot rule out the possibility that the new generations, complete digital natives, would focus, for their entertainment, exclusively on digital products. One could wonder if the singing, including the operatic, stars of the future will be just virtual, perhaps even uttering sounds impossible to utter by human vocal apparatuses, yet still audible and recognizably vocal, by human ears. There will be much of that, I’m sure. But it also appears to me that the human species, narcissistic as we are, will have, and develop, a permanent taste to test the limits of what the species can physically do, be it in the performing dimension, be it in the sporting one. The task ‘exquisite version of Beethoven’s string quartet in C-minor’, ⁹ is a human task today but I cannot assert that it is an essentially human task. One day computers with AI software may accomplish it. However, the task ‘exquisite version by four musicians of Mozart’s string quartet in C-minor’ is, by definition, an essentially human task and, in my opinion, will indefinitely remain a potentially demanded task.

2. (b) The second class of examples I could describe by a double C: care and company. It is well understood that the dramatic, and welcome, extension of lifespan that our times are witnessing will be accompanied by an increasing need of care for the elderly and for the infirm. Similarly, for companionship. Of course, mechanization will also come – in fact it is already here – into the field of care, but, even if this may sound corny, the presence of a human component in care seems to me irreducible. It is not the same to be told that we are seriously ill by a human as by a machine, even if the diagnosis, effectively, is made by one. Similarly for companionship. It is now fashionable to celebrate anthropomorphic robots. We live at the beginning of the era of the cute robot and of the robot as pet. Robots that bow, that sort of smile, that sing a song if a song is what you want, or that kiss you if a kiss is what you wish. My conjecture for the future is that the time of the cute robots will pass, and that we will see the care and companionship relationship determinedly focused on humans; helped, of course, by robots more practical than cute. The point that I now want to make is the obvious one: that one day of human companionship, or care, can only be filled by a day of a human and that, therefore, the potential for jobs of this type is bound to be very large. I have to recognize that this claim does not accord with current conventional wisdom. But this is only because we remain too close to today’s experience where robots are a novelty that mesmerizes us. We should let imagination fly a bit. Consider an aging population with a retirement age of 70 and a life expectancy of 90. ¹⁰ Suppose that every three people above retirement age could benefit by a companion–helper and you have a potential market that could easily employ a population equivalent to the entire labor force between 30 and 40. Add to this that the wish for human helpers, companions, caretakers, trainers, personal assistants, etc., is not restricted to the retired but also applies to the young, and to the participants in the workforce. In fact, one could imagine a whole spectrum of specializations, some catering to the elder, some to the young, some to the middle-aged, some to people employed, etc. Think for a moment of the young, of people of school age. In the future, will there be more or fewer teachers, as a proportion of the population? Teaching is an area where it has been observed that productivity gains are slower than the average (this is known as the Baumol-Bowen cost disease effect ¹¹ ) and where, therefore, the incentives for robotization (well, here one should probably say virtualization) are large. There is little doubt that mechanization will increase its presence in teaching. Yet, we could take the slowness of this happening as evidence that there is indeed a hardcore human component in teaching and that the teaching profession is very far from the threshold of extinction.

The two classes of essentially human tasks I have described, performers and companions, have in common that they provide services directly to people. This is not a necessity for this type of tasks but it seems logical that this is the most fertile ground to generate them. Note also that for both classes the actual creation of jobs is not at all automatically guaranteed. In short, what I have argued, I do not dare say ‘established’, is that even in the most extreme scenarios of vulnerability to robot adoption the possibility of jobs remains, meaning that the potential demand for labor exists.

But we have not gone beyond the possibility or the potential. What does it take for a job to be filled, for it to be real? Take companionship jobs, say for the elderly. I have no doubt that, subject to one condition, the demand for those services will be substantial. The condition is that the elderly have to be well-off since it is likely that this service is not going to be perceived by them as their first need. Is that all? No, the wage of the potential supplier of labor has to be right in relation to the income of the demander. Surely, for any level of wage there is a level of income of demanders at which those would want to activate the task, hence create jobs. But this is not saying much. The real question is whether the income demanders actually have at their disposal is above the critical level that generates demand at the prevailing wage of the supplier. Hence we need to ask: where does the wage, and the income of the demanders, come from, how are they determined? From an economist you will get the standard answer: it depends on supply and demand, what I´m calling the market forces, conditioned very possibly by the fiscal transfer policies of the government.

It is time, therefore, to bring demand and supply into consideration. In Section 4 I’ll deal with transfers and fiscal policy.

My discussion up to now has concerned itself mainly with the demand for labor, and I will not add more to it. To complete the picture, I should now concentrate on the supply. There are many types of jobs (I only consider the legal ones). If we classify them by what a worker is supposed to do, then the pool of workers that potentially could fill a job depends on in-born traits (call them talent) and on acquired traits (call them education). But workers that, at the end of the day, have the same abilities vary also by the degree of pain or displeasure, we call it ‘disutility’, associated with the exercise of the tasks of the job. Thus, the education needed for the job has a cost: some learn faster than others, some enjoy it more than others, some have better alternatives than others. As a consequence, the actual availability of workers for a job, the supply of labor, will depend on the wage (and, strictly speaking, on the wages of alternative jobs).

The actual wage will then emerge from the matching of demand and supply. In textbook fashion, the wage prevailing for a particular job will equalize the number of workers willing to fill the job at that wage with the number of demanders willing to pay it.

I have already mentioned education. Let me go a bit further into this. We are familiar with the statement that education is good, because it provides the possibility to access good jobs, that is to say, jobs with a high productivity. Since wages are aligned, on the whole, with productivities, high-skilled workers will be better compensated than low-skilled workers. Thus, education pays. This is our reality, and, qualitatively, it will be our reality for a long time to come. But I’m not certain we can claim that, logically, the reality of an education premium as large as the present one (which in fact has increased from 1980 to, at least, 2010) ¹² will last forever.

As I have already mentioned, the supply of labor, of every kind, depends on the disutility of the corresponding work, that is, of the pain of every sort (physical, boredom, stress, etc.) associated with its exercise. Suppose for a moment that the more skilled and productive a job is the more interesting it is, at identical wages, to potential workers. Maybe even the tasks associated with it pass, for many people (the less averse to risk are prime candidates), from being a source of pain to a source of pleasure. But then, if work at these jobs, typically frontier jobs, becomes more and more rewarding, what is to deter many people from acquiring the education needed to become a frontier worker? Only one thing: the many barriers to social mobility through education that we are familiar with in our present societies. I believe, however, that these will be eroded by prosperity, democratization and public policies.

Guaranteeing the possibility of education of the kind and up to the level that everyone desires is well within the realm of the socially doable. Thus, I would contemplate a future where the supply of highly skilled people could be large, in comparison to today. A future where, pushing matters to the limit, it is even possible that if there is a technical innovation that makes the job more productive, hence more interesting, the wage associated with that job actually goes down, or where work at the frontier becomes so pleasurable that wages at the frontier may be no higher, or not much higher, than companionship wages. More realistically, I would expect, at least, a decrease of the education premium. The race between education and technology of Goldin and Katz may still be won, at the end, by education. The idea that jobs should be paid according to the painfulness of the effort needed to carry them out is, today, a naïve idea, but to the extent that the net costs of accessing less painful jobs go down, it could become a more germane notion.

It also seems to me plausible that, as mechanization advances in the realm of the mechanizable tasks, those that remain filled by humans are on the whole more interesting and pleasurable to them. The type of work that is most pleasurable is probably hard to mechanize, as it involves, in all likelihood, the exertion of non-routine mental abilities. ¹³ In addition, the incentive to mechanize may turn out to be low for tasks that engage people and have, as a consequence, low disutility. Take the current vogue of computer games designed to generate data for scientific studies. The players of the game may or may not know that they are working for free to satisfy the demand of the researcher, but they do not care. In their minds they are using leisure time.

I should be quick to add that the characteristics of individual workers that affect their wages and that, in contrast to education, are not acquired, namely talent and luck, will continue to be present in the rosy future I’m describing and will continue to influence wages. I see no prospect of change in this dimension. If education generalizes it will become less scarce and the education premium will decrease. But in-born talent will remain scarce, and therefore it is to be supposed that the talent premium will not go down.

It is time to formulate a general conclusion of the discussion so far. It is this: in my opinion, it is not likely that there will be a fundamental lack of job opportunities in the economy of the future. An economy disconnected from work is not humanity’s prospect. Does this mean that, abstracting from the business cycle, full-employment will rule? Yes, properly understood, it should mean this. Let me here be a liberal: in the ideal society of the future everybody should have the right to work as much as they want. To put limits on the workweek, or on the retirement age, will serve no purpose. Whoever wants to work little will work little, and if much, much. Naturally, overall compensation will be commensurate. Historically, the limits in week-hours and the retirement age have been social conquests introduced in the form of law so as to guard against exploitation. As long as this danger exists the legal regulation is appropriate. But the best world would be: no possibility of exploitation and everyone works as much, or as little, as they wish. Maybe at the end of the day it will be the 15 hours of Keynes, although I do not think so (I’m less certain about the average). Precisely because work will become more pleasurable I believe that we will not see the 15 hours, at least for the more interesting jobs.

4. Work and Socially Acceptable Personal Income

Personal income results from the sum of three components: the compensation for work, rent-capital income and the net transfers received from the State. It is important to bear in mind that there is no presumption that the spontaneous functioning of demand and supply will bring the distribution of income into agreement with the distributive justice principles of society (I would vote for reasonably egalitarian principles, neither purely utilitarian nor strictly Rawlsian). Joan Robinson, the brilliant Cambridge disciple of Keynes, wrote that ‘the hidden hand [this is her term for the invisible hand of Adam Smith] will always do its work but it may work by strangulation’.Reference Robinson ^{14 , 15} It follows that once the mechanisms for the determination of labor income and capital-rent income are in place, the responsibility for achieving agreement with the societal principles falls to taxes and transfers, in cash or in kind. For example, in our societies there are now – and it cannot be ruled out on theoretical grounds that there could be in the future – people of working age that do not enjoy capital-rent income and that can only find jobs with salaries that yield a socially unacceptable income. These people should be entitled to subsidies. I think there is wide agreement on that.

The agreement, however, is not so wide on how to do it. I would favor formulas in the general line of the so-called negative income tax: the government supplements the salary per hour in such a way that a socially acceptable income is reached, working the number of hours that society regards as normal. Other, more indirect, methodologies could also be considered, for example income transfers to potential high demanders of certain types of labor. ¹⁶

However, in fairness, I should acknowledge that there is a respectable position that argues that a decent living should be assured by means of a basic universal income. ¹⁷ That, so to speak, by the simple fact of being citizens we are all shareholders of society and that, therefore, we are entitled to a social dividend. The force of the argument, as well as a certain current vogue of the concept in technological circles, ¹⁸ lies in a companion assertion that the era of work is vanishing and that therefore this is the more practical way to insure the well-being of all members of society. Why invent jobs to provide income if these jobs are not needed?

I have expressed up to now the conviction that the era of work is not disappearing, that new tasks and jobs will emerge. Or, with a more nuanced statement: that the task of providing jobs for anybody wishing to work, and capable of working, will not be qualitatively more difficult that it is currently. From this perspective, it seems to me that, as I have suggested, it makes more sense, both from the viewpoint of doctrine and of practicalities, to link the attainment of socially acceptable income to work. In the very lively debates on this point I am taking, therefore, a position akin to the ‘fair reciprocity’ of Stuart White. ¹⁹ The proposition that whoever receives from society should, if capable, contribute to society is, to my mind, a healthy one. It stimulates citizenship and fosters good societies. It is more satisfactory, in terms of self-respect, to derive an entitlement to income from a contribution to society than from the mere fact of being born. For example, in a parallel situation, we feel that a pension based on contributions is a more solid entitlement than one not based on them, even if quantitatively the pension is well above the contributions.

I warn, however, that I reject any notion that, for it to count, real work should be, in the style of a biblical curse, a matter of sweat and pain. The spirit of everything I’m putting forward today is rather that work will become increasingly pleasurable and that this is one of the reasons why the era of work is not ending. Consequently, I would not want to be extreme and entertain any notion of forcing people to work. The contribution to society needs to be voluntary. Those not willing to work, either because they have other sources of income or because, although capable and in good health, they still find working too painful, should be accommodated. A two-pronged approach to do so would establish two levels of income: the socially acceptable income that can be attained by anybody working a normal number of hours, and the lower minimum income that an individual, or better a household, must have at his/her or its disposal to guarantee austere survival. Capable and healthy individuals would choose whether to work and get at least the acceptable income, or not to work and get at least the minimum income.

The responsibility of the public authority would then be: to foster an environment that generates enough jobs (this is key), to fix the levels of acceptable and minimum income, to supplement salaries at the lower end so as to reach acceptable income, and to supplement income for those that choose not to work so as to reach minimum income. It goes without saying, although I have said it repeatedly, that, in all likelihood, this may require a substantial use of the tax instrument. So be it. Redistributive taxation is, in my view, far from an obsolete necessity. In particular, and in line with the position favorable to linking earnings to work that I’m adopting, I should express a considerable disrespect for unearned, including inherited, wealth. Let me add a word of caution: fiscal tools are like a sharp knife. They can be very effective if used carefully and expertly, a disaster if used blindly. In particular, incentives matter.

Allow me to contrast what I’m propounding with the universal basic income idea. There are at least three differences: (i) my proposal is to complement. If, for instance, supply and demand yield a reasonable outcome, no compensatory fiscal action would be required. If, as I expect, it will be necessary, the magnitude would be more realistic than in any universal entitlement of the style of universal basic income; (ii) I’m not contemplating the dismantling of the welfare state and its substitution by universal grants in cash. The welfare state includes a large component in kind, and this is for good reason. Society should not tolerate that a child not be educated because parents allocate their guaranteed income to other priorities. I’m convinced that libertarianism in basic matters will have no place in our future; and (iii) I’m talking about the future and in a context of growth. My suggestions are not for immediate implementation, they need to be paced with growth.

I’m afraid that in spite of what I have just said many colleagues, economists or otherwise, will judge the messages of this speech as very naïve. As I stated at the beginning of this talk, I’m an extreme optimist on the possibility of technology to generate aggregate prosperity, and I’m also an optimist, if more moderate, on the capabilities of the political process to make it a reality and to distribute the returns of growth and prosperity in a manner that society will regard as fair. Moderate because I’m not so sanguine on the association of growth with ethical and political progress.

To partly rescue myself from this naivité label, let me recognize what I regard as a real difficulty and an unsolvable dilemma. The logic of everything I have been saying would lead to the conclusion that for the full efficacy of public economic policies a world government would be optimal. At a doctrinal level, the principles of distributive justice lose strength if applied with more intensity within countries than between countries. More practically, without a world government, fiscal competition or, simply, divergences derived from different prevailing ideologies, severely limits fiscal options, especially, but not only, on business and wealth taxes. Also, on a related, and key, issue, I do not need to remind you of the complexity of climate control in a multi-country world.

However, a world government is not a realistic option and since there is more to life than economic matters, it is neither a desirable one. Our world, so diverse, needs to be a world where the dissident and the different can thrive and, if necessary, take shelter. A world government would be good if good, and bad if bad. In view of the experience of world history, what guarantee is there that it would be good (democratic, respectful of human rights, enlightened, socially concerned, etc.)? Let’s keep the world with its 200 countries.

That said, it should be obvious enough that increasing world cooperation is very desirable, and, as we are seeing daily, very difficult. To my mind the key uncertainty for the future is precisely whether a modicum of good governance will prevail at world level. If it does, I am persuaded that we can contemplate a future that will not be perfect, but where our grandchildren will have the opportunity to work, will want to work, and, thanks mainly to the march of knowledge towards the endless frontier, ²⁰ will have a better life than we have and will enjoy their work to a higher degree than we do.